Thirteen Years Later (12 page)

Iuda issued another command, and these two figures turned, revealing their faces to Aleksei. One was Domnikiia, the other Tamara. He looked up again at Maks’ face, a face that was still laughing – but it was no longer Maks. In front of them all, Iuda crouched down and stared directly at Aleksei. He winked again, but did not reopen his eye, staring ahead of him with just the other, on a level with Aleksei’s as he half walked, half crawled towards him.

Aleksei glanced up once more. The laughing figure hanging from the roof had not changed back. It was still himself – Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, laughing in ecstasy as his lover and his child devoured his flesh. Iuda’s single eye came ever closer until it filled Aleksei’s vision. Aleksei tried to join in with his own laughter as Iuda’s eye pressed up against the wall from the other side, gazing into Aleksei’s own, but as he opened his mouth it was not laughter that spewed forth, but a long, deep, terrible scream.

Aleksei’s scream filled the dark wilderness. He sat up. The fire he had made had gone out, but as he reached his hand towards it he felt the warmth of its embers. The high half-moon made it easy to see, but cast eerie shadows through the trees. He had not had that dream for many years. It was a dream he might have avoided if he had actually stayed to witness Maks’ death. Knowledge of the reality of what had happened inside that hut, however terrible, would at least be a certainty into which no macabre speculation could creep. But Aleksei had not stayed; he had ridden away, just
as Iuda had told him to. Could he not then dismiss the whole thing as the fantasies of his guilty imagination? How he wished it were that simple, but though he had not witnessed Maks’ death, he had seen enough elsewhere to know that the images in the dream were based on truth.

A few months after he had left Maks to die, in a town south of here, he had witnessed a very similar scene. The victim had been no one he knew, just a serf, whose wife had already met the same fate. Aleksei’s eye, pressed up to a crack at the edge of a barn door, had seen the Oprichniki do to that peasant much what they had done to Maks in the dream.

But what of the end of the nightmare? It had been over five years since Aleksei had last dreamt it, but even then it would end with Domnikiia. Did he still doubt her? Such was the power of the games Iuda had played with him that even now – thirteen years after his death – Aleksei could still be asking himself that question. Iuda had presented Aleksei with a scene: two bodies entwining; a woman exchanging blood with a monster; Domnikiia choosing to abandon all that was good and to become a vampire; Domnikiia choosing to abandon Aleksei.

But the scene had not been what it seemed. Domnikiia had not become a vampire. The woman had not been Domnikiia but her friend Margarita. Iuda was not a vampire, but a mortal man. As each page of the story turned, Iuda had ensured that Aleksei’s view changed, until Aleksei was so familiar with change he could no longer cling to any certainty. He knew he had been wrong, but he could not know precisely how, nor could he ever fully determine the truth of that one, vital concept: that the woman had not been Domnikiia. Whether it was true or untrue, either possibility fitted the facts with equanimity. That was the eternity of doubt that, even in death, Iuda had planned for Aleksei.

Aleksei’s solution had been simple, and one that men have turned to throughout history – faith. Where he could not be sure he would choose to believe what he wanted to believe. And what he wanted to believe was that Domnikiia had never desired to be
a vampire, had not been the figure Aleksei saw in the window that evening, had never tasted Iuda’s blood on her lips. It was easy to believe, and over the years it had become easier with every hour he spent with her. But faith was still different from certainty, and his dream was a reminder from somewhere deep in his unconscious mind that there was another possibility.

There was still no way of knowing. Domnikiia might have been the woman at the window and later been distraught to discover she was not a vampire, and again to hear of Iuda’s death, but she would never reveal the truth to Aleksei, if that truth was what he did not want to hear. And he did not. He imagined, sometimes, a deathbed confession from her, telling him what had happened, telling him that she had regretted her mortal life ever since. But were there any prospect of that, he would avoid her deathbed. It would have been one thing to learn the truth soon after the events had taken place, but to learn it later would reveal the hollowness not only of Domnikiia, but of the whole edifice of faith he had created over the years. What devout Christian would want a priest to whisper in his ear at the moment of death, ‘It’s all a lie’? Who knew? Perhaps that’s what priests did.

And so the truth for him, in his heart at least, was that Domnikiia had always been faithful. And over the years the doubts – and the dreams of doubts – had become fainter and less frequent. It was only the fact of being here, of seeing once again the place where Maks had died and of sleeping virtually alongside where his body lay, that had brought the nightmare back to him.

And yet, there was something new in that nightmare – Tamara. In the five years since he had last dreamed it, he and Domnikiia had had their daughter. She was being raised by her mother. If Domnikiia could not be trusted, how might she form her daughter’s character? What lies that had passed from Iuda to Domnikiia during their brief moments together might be passed on to the next generation in Tamara?

Such were Aleksei’s deepest fears, as expressed to him in his dream, but they were not his beliefs. These thoughts were but
temptations to test his faith. He had kept his faith for thirteen years. Had he not, there would have been no Tamara. Such goodness came out of faith, not truth.

But the truth always sat there at the back of his mind, impenetrably disguised, watching him, taunting him, waiting. He did not know how he could remove that disguise and discover what had really happened. If he did know how, he doubted he would do it. But still the truth was there, waiting to be revealed.

He lay back down on the ground, closing his eyes, though he knew he would not sleep, and awaited the light of dawn.

It was pitch dark when the ship finally sailed from Ragusa. The crew was small and trustworthy – none of them locals. The Dalmatians knew enough to fear their passenger, but that fear might be so great as to tempt them, in the safety of the midday sun, to slip both him and his cargo overboard, turn round and head for home. Instead, he had chosen a crew from amongst his own people, further inland to the north-east. They were less skilled as sailors, but the journey would be short and the waters were calm.

The ship was not noteworthy, scarcely more than a large yacht. She went by the name of
R
zbunarea
, but that could easily be changed if anonymity were required, as could the flag she flew. At the moment, she was French, but there were a dozen other nationalities stored below deck.

Though small,
R
zbunarea
was swift. There were only two items of cargo. On her return she would be a little lower in the water, but few would notice. She sped down the Adriatic, towards the Strait of Otranto, though that was not her final destination; that was many days away.

Her sole passenger stood and stared at the night sky and inhaled the sea air. He had no fear of the water, as some thought he should. Even so, he would not spend much of the journey on deck. When he arrived, he would have work to do, and that work would require concentration, and concentration required rest.

* * *

Aleksei mounted his horse soon after dawn. He took one final look at Maks’ grave, and hoped he would never return. He had no need of a memorial to remember his friend, and he had never felt the urge to return here in all the years since his death. He had only come now because he had been led here. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the theatre ticket. He had three days until the performance. He enjoyed ballet, and though he knew the story of
Cinderella
well, he had not seen this version. Perhaps this whole journey had been an elaborate way of giving him a present, though his birthday was long past. Perhaps it was just a ploy by Domnikiia to bring him to Moscow.

He laughed at the thought. She needed no such ploys, and whatever the reason he had been invited to the theatre, it was not for entertainment.

He spurred his horse and headed back to Moscow. He did not look behind him again.

Aleksandr could see the small cortège from quite a distance. It had surprised him how much he had missed the company of the tsaritsa. It had been his grandmother Yekaterina who had arranged their marriage, more than thirty years before, as she had arranged everything in his life. She had brusquely decided that neither Aleksandr’s mother nor his father – her own son, the future Tsar Pavel – was fit to raise their child. Yekaterina had controlled every aspect of Aleksandr’s upbringing, from his education to his marriage to Yelizaveta at the age of just fifteen. He had quickly learned to hate his wife, but had grown to despise his grandmother more. He had learned from her too, though. Her reign had been founded on the untimely death of her husband; Aleksandr’s similarly, on the death of his father. Both had successfully kept their hands clean; the
garde perdue
was not a new idea.

But time had changed Aleksandr’s attitudes, towards both his wife and his grandmother. Russia was a difficult country to rule,
and Yekaterina had known that it needed a tsar who emulated his
babushka
more than it needed one who loved her. He could almost sense her approval of his plans for dealing with the rebels back in Petersburg.

And he had grown to realize the wisdom in her choice of Yelizaveta Alekseevna as his consort. What had seemed at first merely an unhappy political union had evolved into a mutually supportive friendship. He was not restricted to the concept that a man’s wife should be his only lover – Grandmother, of all people, would not have espoused that. Even so, they had had two children, daughters, who had both died before their second birthdays. It seemed too long ago now to think of their deaths as tragedies. Aleksandr had lost another child far more recently. Sophia, his daughter by Maria Naryshkina, had died of consumption in 1824. She had been eighteen. His other daughter with Maria, Zinaida, had died at the age of just four. He had other children by other mistresses, the youngest only four years old, but he thanked the Lord on all their behalves for blessing them with the gift of bastardy. None would inherit from him the heavy yoke that was the crown.

None of this was a secret to the tsaritsa; nor were her infidelities to him. When Sophia died, Yelizaveta had been a great comfort to him, and her own illness had in turn proved to them both how much they cared for each other. For Aleksandr, the future – these next few months in particular – was unclear. To have his wife with him, perhaps for the last time, would be a consolation.

The carriages were closer now. He stood impassively, not wanting to appear over-eager to see his wife, even though he had ridden out specifically to accompany her on the final leg of the journey. She had arrived only ten days after him, and he hoped she had not tired herself. In Taganrog that evening, their first port of call would be the monastery, where the abbot and the monks would line up to greet the tsaritsa, and then a service of thanksgiving would be performed. Her rooms in the palace were all prepared.

But as much as Aleksandr would be pleased to see his wife again, he was impatient for the arrival of another in her party, Prince Volkonsky – a man who was indispensable when it came to matters of state. Volkonsky had been one of those who had overthrown Aleksandr’s father in 1801 – one of the few whom Aleksandr had subsequently allowed to remain close to the throne. Wylie had been another, though he had been less involved – less involved even than Aleksandr. The Scottish doctor had merely signed a politically acceptable death certificate for Pavel, blaming the death on apoplexy. It was strange how those two men remained so close to him. The dispersal of the others to various backwaters of the empire had not been the outpouring of Aleksandr’s guilty conscience; it was simply wise to make it clear to the world that one was unlikely to prosper by daring to overthrow a tsar.
Babushka
would have been proud.